Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

A Revival for Broadway Joe

Joe Namath was in the back of the auditorium, watching a documentary about himself. Ninety minutes of Joe Willie. It tickled him to watch, and he chuckled now and then as he sat beside his attentive older daughter, Jessica.

Why not have a laugh? He’s had a humdinger of a life. How can you not draw a smile at that Super Bowl guarantee coming true again; at wearing panty hose for Beauty Mist; at being in a movie love scene with Ann-Margret that was scripted by her husband; and at hearing again his younger self declaring that it would be un-American not to “go around and have a drink with a lady now and then”?

How could he not smile at another night of adulation and at time with teammates like Rich Caster and Emerson Boozer? Namath is 68, his back is stooped and he walks on artificial knees.

But his green eyes still glimmer, and his smile is a reminder of when the Jets were winners and you didn’t need a personal seat license to guarantee a season ticket with a good view. His Broadway Joe character is archival now; he leads a quiet life in Tequesta, Fla., a single father of two adult daughters who have given him three grandchildren.

The documentary “Namath: Beaver Falls to Broadway” (Saturday, HBO, 9 p.m. Eastern) features excerpts from 15 hours of conversations between Namath and producers from HBO Sports and NFL Films. He acts as the genial host of his story, talking directly into the camera as if he were wooing Raquel Welch.

Sobriety becomes him as a storyteller. He is candid, funny and dramatic (watch him describe his first meeting in Alabama Coach Bear Bryant’s imperial observatory tower in Tuscaloosa). He gesticulates often as his biography rolls by: the multisport schoolboy star of Beaver Falls, Pa., becomes Bryant’s quarterbacking stud, and sustains his first significant knee injury. He signs with the Jets, leads them to victory in the Super Bowl and revels in life as a sex symbol, commercial superstar and eternal deity for Jets fans demoralized since 1969.

But he uses alcohol to anesthetize his physical pain — he looked about as fragile as any quarterback who ever played — and the depression that accompanied his divorce.

After the screening, someone handed him a cup of coffee on a saucer. “I thought you were going to bring me Johnnie Walker,” he said, laughing again.

Photo

Joe Namath and his former teammate Emerson Boozer at the premiere of a documentary from HBO Sports and NFL Films.Credit
Craig Barritt/Getty Images

Some of the reporters asking him questions laughed, too. You wonder why. Late in the film, he talked about the embarrassment of being drunk in 2003 during a Jets game at Giants Stadium, when he answered a question about his old team from the ESPN sideline reporter Suzy Kolber by telling her, “I want to kiss you.”

Soon after he was in rehab. Had he not gone, he said Wednesday, he figures he would have been dead.

HBO had long wanted to produce a Namath documentary. Ross Greenburg, the former president of its sports division who negotiated the deal to make it, has been a fan of Namath’s since childhood. When asked why he agreed, Namath did not talk about being paid. He said he did not want to participate and broach subjects that upset him. But he said he trusted “minds sharper than mine” at HBO and NFL Films.

Kriegel’s book is too definitive — certainly more than, say, Namath’s own “I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow ... ’Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day” — to have lost much without lengthy interviews with Namath. At 512 pages, it has more depth than the documentary, especially about Namath’s upbringing, his relationships with his siblings, his parents’ divorce, his amorous single life, his marital split, his drinking and his children.

But HBO and NFL Films had the advantage of Namath’s post-sobriety change of heart about speaking at length about his life. And perhaps the money he received was not a primary reason for his participation.

At 68, maybe it just seemed like time to open up, to a filmmaker or a writer.

His agreement helped to create a typically absorbing visual experience by the production partners. It is framed at the start by the reminiscences of Beaver Falls, like the barber who prattles about Namath’s youthful greatness while he shaves a skittish-looking customer; filled in the middle by film, some of it rare, of Namath in high school and college when, oh boy, he really could run; and at the end by the emotional 50th anniversary reunion last September of Namath’s 1960-61 high school team.

You sense that Grandpa Joe Willie hasn’t been back home much.

E-mail: sandor@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2012, on Page B13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Revival for Broadway Joe. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe